Yup I have a bit of a routine for writing! I sometimes because of circumstance have to shake it up, but mostly it’s the same.

If I’m at home then I’m on my PC. I have a black office swivel chair, it’s kinda old and a bit collapsed and fraying but it’s still comfy. It’s kinda big for the room, especially because a couple of days ago I lost my home office and everything has been squished into the one room, but I wouldn’t swap it out for anything. I write in Word 2003, in Calibri font. I don’t know why but I always fix the margins to 2cm and Calibri before I start.

I have two monitors. Every day I have a fresh document, and if I work on multiple projects in a day then I have a new document for each. I open this in the right monitor. On the left monitor I have my planning document, and the overall document for the current project. Plus google chrome so I can spellcheck words I’ve spelled so badly Word’s dictionary can’t fix them, or I can pull up the thesaurus when I can’t think of a word, and of course tumblr when I need a distraction 🙂

If I’m home alone then I play music through the speakers – I’m always playing music – but if people are here then I put my headphones in. What I listen to varies, sometimes it’s music that fits the project (I create project playlists occasionally), or sometimes it’s something to get the blood pumping. There’s this song Odd One by the Sick Puppies, which if I really can’t focus, I always put on repeat until I get going. There’s something about the line “we’ll laugh at this one day” which just helps me calm down and put the work into perspective.

I can work away from home. I have a Macbook Pro laptop, which isn’t as old as my PC (my PC is 2 years older). The U key is loose and I have to hammer it on occasion as it falls off, but the battery life is still really good (it’ll last hours and hours) despite being 8 years old. I have Pages on that, and I don’t do anything special as it’s a Mac and doesn’t have any fonts. I just create a new document and write. It usually messes up my formatting which is irritating when I port it back to Word but that’s fixable. Headphones are a must to cut out distractions.

To be honest though. Routine is irrelevant, it’s all about mentality. If my subconscious says “nope, won’t, you can’t make me” then nothing on Earth is going to get me to write. However, if I’m in the right headspace, then I could be in the living room, half-holding a conversation and still write. I could be anywhere, and then jot a few paragraphs down on my phone. I don’t know why sometimes I can write, and sometimes I can’t. It’s very annoying.

Thanks for the question! 🙂

Awwww thanks, I hope you’ll enjoy it and I welcome any and all asks heh 🙂

Ok, so how did I get started writing? Well, I don’t know really, it’s something I’ve always done for as long as I can remember. I was a voracious reader as a child, and I’m assuming at some point somebody told me I could write my own stories. Maybe I’d run out of reading material for the millionth time, and it was to keep me occupied I don’t know heh.

I don’t remember my early stuff. It was obviously on paper and I don’t have it, but I’m not ruling out the possibility that my mum does. Mum’s keep that kind of thing 🙂 However, I never delete anything digital. I mainly wrote fanfic until I was 16 (and then I quit fanfic for a decade until I started writing Rumbelle) but I do still have the original stories I attempted when I was 11. I never look at them for obvious reasons but back then I was obviously quite ambitious. I had started 3-4 different books in the same series, they were mystery/adventure novels, sort of a private investigator type deal. I imagine there were several because the start was shiny, and not complicated, and once I got into the nitty gritty detail of the plot I lost interest.

I wish I had a funny story about a ‘lightbulb moment’ when I first started writing, but nope it’s just been a part of my life since forever.

Wow that’s a really interesting question. I was a bit stuck on how to answer it, until I saw that there was just ‘fic’ hiding small behind scene and dialogue. I have songs for fics, but nothing particularly comes to mind for a specific scene or piece of dialogue.

Fall All Over Again – get it’s title from a song, which is funnily enough called Fall All Over again by Dan Hill. I first heard this song in a fan music video for Jack/Irina from Alias. It doesn’t fit Lacey and Rumple/Gold exactly but there are some poignant parts. Plus that song gives me feelings, I don’t know why.

I Love the Way – also gets it’s title from a song. The full title of which is I Love the Way You Love Me by Boyzone. I’m showing my age a bit with that one, but it really fit the verse, and said everything I wanted about Belle and Gold’s relationship. I was listening to it, and wishing that I could just condense that song into a title, hence why I tried. It’s not a brilliant title, but that’s because I wished I could use the whole song.

I’ve used song titles, as fic titles, for various other fics but the songs aren’t necessarily important, the title just had the image I wanted.

*flaps hands excitedly* I’ve never had anyone send the WIP meme for me before! 🙂 I thought that this was a really random word and I wouldn’t have it and then I remembered Nightwalkers. It appears 6x in that document.

——————

In fact the entire station smelled more like an office building or a school, than
a police station.

She glanced out the window and saw Neal getting police cordon tape out of the trunk
of the second cruiser.

“They can handle fingerprints and things like that, but they’ll probably package up
the samples and send them to the main police lab in Boston.”

“Whatever you spend, I will donate the same amount to the police benevolent fund.”

Plus, she remembered Gold’s promise to donate the same amount to the police
benevolent fund to cure her reluctance. It was an absurd amount of money for a
private citizen to donate to a police operation.

Haha awww thanks, although that tag is very self-serving because it sort of exists in the hope people will use it. Plus I like to send everyone I notice who is doing TMI Tuesday a question, and quite often I get stuck, so tag to the rescue with questions 🙂

Anyway, wow what a question! Let me think. To be honest (shameful confession here) aside from fanfic I don’t read that much but I do watch a fair bit of TV. So I tend to write and visualize what I’m writing as a TV episode or a movie, and then it’s just a matter of putting what’s in my head on paper. I don’t obviously see everything, I just get flashes of certain scenes, and some images are more vivid than others.

Between Two Fires – was sort of a science-fiction/espionage mashup which I love, and hope to write more of that verse one day. That was quite visually strong. The other fic that comes to mind as being very visually striking is The Beauty and the Tragedy.

Out of the two of them, I think I would go with Between Two Fires, purely because it had so many things in that I love. That fic was a real guilty pleasure. Sci-fi is probably my favorite genre these days, but several years ago it was espionage, and bringing the two together – well I had fun 🙂 Heh I’m smiling now, just picturing it.